Blocked By Age

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September 22, 2011 by Angela Shupe | 1 Comment

It didn’t matter that Jason Parks had nine years of business experience when he was interested in leasing office space. The landlord told the realtor, “I’ve seen a lot of young guys like him come and go, and they’re all talk,” and the deal was off.

This wasn’t the first roadblock Parks had faced during his entrepreneurial journey, reports Globe and Mail.

He was just 22 when he launched Profab – which began as a welding company and now has 150 employees and several divisions servicing the oil, gas, construction and agriculture industries – and Mr. Parks knows he has a young-looking face.

It’s the kind of situation that a lot of young entrepreneurs face. While young entrepreneurship is on the rise, and many firms are headed by fresh-faced bosses, their age can sometimes create problems and cause them to meet resistance.

Just because of how old they are, or how old they look, some entrepreneurs may face assumptions about their competence from customers or suppliers, and others may have difficulties with employees working for a boss decades their junior.

They may also have to overcome financing obstacles, as financial institutions balk at their lean ages and credit histories. Some find people just don’t take them seriously.

So what do they do about it? Mr. Parks’s solution was to show off his success.

He gathered a few pages of financial information about Profab that showed the company was growing and thriving, and sent them over to the landlord the next day.